Recent reviews by Operator J-23

Hey, you're pretty good!

10/10, fixing review since we won our IRL Major Order and Sony walked back the PSN account linking. Hope you all do the same .

It's the Alien game I always wanted.

Big recommend, lots of reasons. If you find any aspect of this game appealing, you'll probably find a lot more of it appealing once you sit down and play it.

This is just like one of my japanese animes.

Sneaky Stabby Good

I pet the dog and then I pet the 'dusa

This is a game where everyone is cold and it's your job to make them warm.

I enjoy this game, as it is a big stompy mechwarrior game, but the game keeps asking me to look past flaws and make compromises. Too many details and easy fixes are missing, a lot of people are upset about the design decisions to make mechs more role based and less customizable. That's fine and all, I can look past that and accept that I'm not making laser-legs ubermechs or anything. I can look past all that.

What I cannot look past is game breaking bugs, like enemy mechs and enemies spawning inside of walls and mountains. In a regular mission, you can just leave, but in campaign missions, there's no way to reset the terrain, so if you encounter this, you're just stuck. Game breaking bugs this late in the game's life?

Give me a break. This isn't a modernized Mechwarrior game, there is no innovation here, nothing is new, and the basic design is flawed. Going from planet to planet in a sandbox would be fine but after only a few hours you start to see the patterns emerge, it gets very same-y. This wouldn't be so bad, but it contrasts heavily with the custom built campaign and story maps, which provide deliberately built play areas. When you play one of these, then go back to playing regular missions, you realize quickly that every mission takes place in a box filled with slight variations on the same tileset.

It's actually lazy.

Even as you fly around being a merc, you have little to no effect on the world around you as the war progresses. I get that it's locked to a timeline, but again, that can be changed for the sake of design, for a more fun experience. The lore isn't even respected all that much as to adhere so strictly to those events anyway.

For every one thing I look past, another thing rears its head. I don't mind the re-use of old mech models, the graphics or any of that. The basic gameplay works, but the context around that gameplay is held back by a total lack of innovation.

The story, scattered as it is, is also gravely inconsistent, a lot of ludo-narrative dissonance here. One moment, you are a merc out for cash, you kill civies or whatever without much question because its your job. Then the plot takes over later and in one mission you actually swap sides because you disagree with your employer. Morallity aside, this is completely inconsistent with the character you have been established to be up to this point. Why start drawing a line here and not all those other times you ruined countless lives?

Again, if any of this were more consistent, it would be better. Less plot, less characterization, or more plot and more characterization. But every little plot beat in this game, side plot or main plot, feels like it was written by a totally different person.

Any one element you could look past and have a good time, but the longer you play, the more these inconsistencies in the story, the design, the limited mechanics, the shockingly oppressive tonnage limits when you don't have enough mechbay slots to fit every tonnage limit on demand... the more these things build up and creep on you. And then the crashes start.

I want to recommend this game. Maybe mods will fix this game when they finally start hitting steam, but so far I haven't found many, if any, Nexus mods that work with the steam version.

Give this game to someone passionate. Sector D2 made Project Wingman with 3 guys and it's basic story elements, team chatter, and design philosophy is miles better than this much larger, much lazier production.

Either go all in to please the lore junkies, please the mechanics junkies, the table top junkies, or ... anyone. Because as it is right now, it only pleases those who are thirsty for a single player mechwarrior experience and I totally relate to that, and yet I feel like my thirst has betrayed me.

EDIT: Updates and fixes repaired many of my issues. It's fine, I give it a recommend now, but I would still like to have more meat in the future.

Bayonetta is a game. It is a good game. Play Bayonetta. Submit to frog.